Tuesday round-up

Yesterday the Court issued two opinions in two argued cases, as well as orders from the May 31 Conference. The Court granted certiorari in one new case, Bailey v. United States.

In Armour v. City of Indianapolis, the Court held that because the city had a rational basis for its distinction between homeowners who paid their taxes in a lump sum and those who paid in installments, the city’s refusal to provide a refund to lump-sum payers did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Lyle Denniston of this blog describes the opinion as “full of admonitions against courts’ second-guessing of state and local tax policy”; other coverage comes from Greg Stohr of Bloomberg and Maureen Groppe of the Indianapolis Star. Brent Kendall of WSJ Law Blog focuses on the dissent, written by the Chief Justice Roberts and joined by Justices Scalia and Alito, and the fact that Justice Thomas “unusually” joined the majority in this case.

In the second opinion of the day, Reichle v. Howards, the Court unanimously held that two Secret Service agents are entitled to qualified immunity from claims that they arrested a man in retaliation for remarks made about then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Breyer, filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, while Justice Kagan recused herself from the case. The majority opinion, as Lyle Denniston of this blog explains, “chose to leave unanswered the power of police or federal agents to arrest a political protester whose views the officers find objectionable,” and instead focused only on the narrow question of immunity. Other coverage of the decision comes from Greg Stohr of Bloomberg, Adam Liptak of the New York Times, Bill Mears of CNN, Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor, David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, Mark Sherman of the Associated Press, Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post, Robert Barnes of the Washington Post, Josh Gerstein of Politico, Ruthann Robson of Constitutional Law Prof Blog, and Reuters. And Mike Dorf of the eponymous Dorf on Law characterizes the opinion as “a missed opportunity to clearly establish that government officials may not arrest people in retaliation for the exercise of their free speech rights, even if there may be some other ground on which an arrest might be based.”

Orders from the May 31 Conference included only one new grant: Bailey v. United States, in which the Court will consider whether police officers may detain an individual incident to the execution of a search warrant when the individual has left the immediate vicinity of the premises before the warrant is executed. The Associated Press and Courthouse News have brief summaries of the issues in Bailey.

And finally, other coverage focused on the cases in which the Court denied review. The Court declined to review the federal bribery convictions of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy (Bloomberg, Ballot Access News, CNN, Los Angeles Times) or the reinstatement of charges against four Blackwater security guards (Reuters, Associated Press), among others. Lyle Denniston of this blog also notes that the Court did not act on any of the seven new Guantanamo cases, but “that does not mean anything conclusive about whether the Court will at some point grant or deny any of the cases.”

Briefly:

Howard Wasserman of PrawfsBlawg discusses why the Court has not yet ruled on any of the free speech cases from this Term.

At the Huffington Post, Leon Friedman examines the relationship between the Court and Congress, especially in light of the Affordable Care Act litigation.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.